Curtain Call (Art of Place, Glenorchy)

Curtain Call is an outcome of the Art of Place workshop series based at Moonah Arts Centre in late 2015, which explored experiences and perceptions of this place via walking, photography and text. Participants experimented with the inclusion of their own presence in the photographs- like a selfie but different! Sometimes this was via traces of their physical presence- such as shadows or reflections, and other times by photographing a personal object placed within the landscape.

This collaborative artwork was installed at Moonah Arts Centre, Tasmania, as part of the Glenorchy Open exhibition, February- April 2016. It references (and hopes to contribute to obliterating!) the locally ingrained notion of the ‘Flannelette Curtain’, which attributes negative stereotypes to this place and the people who live here. According to many residents of Hobart, this ‘line’ runs along Creek Road, separating the latté drinkers on its southern side and flannelette shirt-wearers to its north. We believe this socially differentiating line is snobbish, unhelpful and simply inaccurate. This curtain comprised of multiple images of Glenorchy area taken by local residents aims to reveal nuances of life beyond the ‘curtain’.The soundscape comprises text generated by participants from the embodied experience of walking around the area, with Situationist-inspired awareness of ‘psychogeographic’ effects. The written text was recorded spoken by the group members simultaneously to evoke the overlay of subjective and visceral observations of pedestrians in a Glenorchy street. These sounds form, in their indecipherable multiplicity, perhaps a more accurate representation of the complex social ‘fabric’ of the place than the stereotype of the Flannelette Curtain.